New Orleans is called The Big Easy, which suggests, among other things, that nobody here gets worked up over anything.

We are committed to leisure, quiescent and complacent. Dismiss us with a
"Let them eat cake," and we're liable to sprinkle some purple, green and gold sugar on
it and have ourselves a party.

Isn't that the popular perception of who we are? How, then, to explain the restless mood that has settled over New Orleans and Louisiana this summer? There's no more appropriate time to be lackadaisical and lazy than in a hot Louisiana summer, but in these hot months of 2008, the masses have devoted less time trying to stay cool and more time railing against glaring abuses of power.

From the legislative pay raises to Mandeville Mayor Eddie Price's alcohol-fueled demolition derby, from a police officer running amok to Mayor Ray Nagin's administration's overuse of credit cards, there is a common theme that has drawn the ire of the general public: the
idea that the rules aren't consistently applied to all people.

The inscription on the eastern face of the criminal courthouse in New Orleans reads, "This is a
government of law, not of men." It expresses the egalitarianism that democratic republics hold sacred.

But there are times when it seems the de facto rule has been borrowed from the pages of George Orwell's "Animal Farm," as in, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more
equal than others." It's against that notion that so many people are rebelling. They insist that equality come with no qualifiers

They insist, for example, that everybody who admits to throwing back a couple before crashing into a Causeway toll booth barrier be properly suspected of drunken driving and given a standard field sobriety test. Nothing accounts for Mayor Price's lenient treatment by the Causeway Police Department except his mayoral status, putting the lie to the aforementioned
inscription that an individual's position is irrelevant to the law.

Donyell Sanchell's position certainly seems to have mattered. The New Orleans police officer led Crescent Connection officers on a chase that took them into New Orleans. It was in the city that officer Sanchel briefly stopped before he allegedly made contact with one of the CCC officers with his pickup truck.

Stopped a second time, Sanchell allegedly slapped the CCC officer in the face. How many times have we seen motorists who bump officers with their cars get booked with the attempted
murder of an officer? How many times have we seen suspects who make physical contact with an officer be beaten bloody before being booked
with a felony?

However, the spokesman of the Department of Transportation and Development, which oversees the CCC, said the assaulted officer didn't want to make a big deal over Sanchell's alleged offense and chose to report it as a misdemeanor.

That's the kind of special consideration the general public would never get. That's the kind of special consideration the general public doesn't want a select few getting.

Most perks that politicians and other well-placed folks demand for themselves don't include exemption from criminal charges. Most just want to be treated extra special because
they believe themselves to be extra special.

That's how we get Nagin protesting that charging meals with his wife to the city's credit card is copacetic. It's how we get legislators voting to raise their own pay and calling the public's
protests ignorant.

What's ignorant is the idea that the public is OK with different rules for different folks. Egalitarianism remains our natural impulse. Yes, even here in the Big Easy.